Recent migration trends have spurred debate about how generous welfare states treat newcomers. The prevailing view suggests immigrants benefit most from these systems, but this paper questions that assumption.

Welfare State Logic

Europe's unemployment benefits evolved to be stratified rather than universally accessible. This creates a significant gap between the systems' structure and their actual impact on immigration.

Reality of Restrictive Systems

Benefit generosity often doesn't translate into better protection for immigrants, particularly recent arrivals who face more barriers in accessing support.

Research Findings

Micro-level data from 14 Western European countries reveals a counterintuitive pattern: the most generous systems tend to exclude migrants most effectively. These findings call previous assumptions about automatic immigrant protections into question and highlight how benefit generosity can sometimes reinforce migration restrictions.